"The creative adult is the child who has survived."
--Ursula K. Le Guin

December 07, 2010

I don't make sense?

Did you feel the shift in the space-time continuum yesterday? Yeah, it was me. I cleaned the windows in the living room and vacuumed up the cobwebs. (Wow. Two words with two u's in them in one short paragraph.)

There is talk of getting the tree sometime this weekend. The tree makes me claustrophobic because it's covered in sparkly, fragile things that may burn the house down or that may break if you breathe on them the wrong way because they're as old as I am (and I may break if you breathe on me the wrong way, too, come to think of it). So I "deal" with my anxiety by deep-cleaning the house. If the cobwebs are gone, then at least I'll be able to hit my head against a clean wall. If the windows are clean, then I will be able to look outside and imagine fresh air and freedom instead of feeling trapped in a house with a tree that might catch on fire.

I know. It doesn't make sense.

Since I returned from NYC (Yeah... I didn't tell you I went... Do you want to hear about the trip? Or shall we just sweep it under the rug again?), I have been trying to re-do the Curious Farm website. This has been challenging for me because it's the first site we're running on WordPress. For something that is supposed to empower a user, WordPress takes away a lot of the control I'm used to. In the end, I decided to keep the "theme" we've been using for another six months and just clean up the site quite a bit. Why six months? Well, maybe we'll keep it after then, too, but I very much hope to have some big business decisions made by June 2011. When those decisions are made, the farm may need a different kind of website.

The Curious Farm website retains the same look-and-feel, but I re-organized it and took away a lot of text. The blog is still there that tells the story of what we're trying to accomplish with the farm, but I realized there was no need to keep talking about what we're trying to accomplish because we've already accomplished it. Now the farm is running. We grow things. We have customers. I make legal pickles. A year later (the farm is almost a year old!), the farm is not just a reality, it is in motion.

It has been tremendously affirming to recognize how far we've come this year. It hasn't been easy, and I still want to cry from frustration sometimes, but -- you know -- we made a working farm and a pickle business in a year. It's amazing what a woman can accomplish when her child goes to full-day kindergarten.

Next time I'll let you know before I vacuum the ceiling again so that you can hang on to something. Sorry about that.